"Coffee (Fucking)" [ft. Wale]

Miguel is kind of a cornball, and he does not give a fuck if you know it—matter of fact, he wears it with pride. He's the guy who flirts by instigating a rousing game of rock-paper-scissors ("Wait, best out of three!"), the guy who drop-kicked a woman in the head on live TV while attempting an ill-conceived, though certainly enthusiastic, flying jump maneuver, and kept right on singing. Miguel does not text cautiously after a first date; he is not afraid of coming on too strong. In a post-ironic world, he sometimes feels like the last earnest one left.

So it makes sense that "Coffee (Fucking)"—an earlier, abridged version of which appeared on the three-song EP he released in December—channels the power-balladry of the 1980s, the last time this kind of unabashed sincerity was cool. "I’ve never felt comfortable like this," he crows, a revelatory counterpoint to the last five years of cynical, intimacy-starved popular R&B presented by jaded men who court best from behind glowing screens. He’s never been shy about his Prince worship, and though "Coffee" isn’t as on-the-nose as Art Dealer Chic’s "Party Life", I get the same awed impression of sex here that I take away from the best Prince songs: something at once mythical and easy, something that connects the dots between sweeping claims about the universe and some tiny freckle that no one’s ever noticed before. (And something that’s okay to laugh about, too—which begins to justify Wale’s puns about morning wood.) In an age where our R&B heroes proclaim their lack of emotions a little too loudly, "Coffee" presents intimacy as infinitely bad-ass: "A cold flame, the thrill of no shame."